First bank holiday of the year

So I know America has a huge budget deficit but they also have a huge bank holiday deficit with the first holiday of the year (apart from new year's day) coming at the end of May - Memorial Day which is when American's remember the last time they got a holiday. They typically get around this obvious government blunder by 'working from home' a lot. E.g. 'It's Friday, I'm working from home', or 'WFH, sick dog' and the like.

Anyway the weekend we just had was simply glorious, we did some work on the screen porch getting it ready for the Summer and spent a couple of afternoons on our local lakeside beach
I also made it out on the bike for a ride. I'm doing the MS 150, a 150 mile bike ride over a couple of days from Duluth to Minneapolis in order to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis society. The biggest challenge is that I have to complete the 75 miles on the first day by 1:30 in the afternoon in order to watch the England USA world cup match. So I've been getting up and out on the bike before 6am in order to get 45 miles done before 9am and not disrupt the weekend too much. If you are interested in sponsoring me you need to do it soon as the ride is on the 12th of June and I got a late start due to both my natural tardiness and some pain with the US Embassy. If you can sponsor me click here to make an online donation.

Becky also finished nursery this week and they had a 'graduation' ceremony (personally I'm with Mr Incredible on this concept but everyone else seems to love them).
Here's Becky looming over the rest of her class
Becky and her friend Lexa


Our church also did a food packaging event for Feed My Starving Children, a charity organisation founded in Minnesota which uses volunteers to package nutritionally balanced meals for areas of world where they desperately need food. We were really short of volunteers so the kids and grandparents pitched in on a few occasions and ultimately we hit the target of packaging 300,000 meals in 3 days with only half the number of people normally required.

And finally, Becky was in her end of year ballet show dressed as a chick - birdy song anyone?

Raining in California

With the Summer finally coming to Minnesota I had a business trip out to the center of the US wine region, Napa Valley in California, where the weather, sadly was not so hot.

Despite a pretty packed agenda we managed to get a sliver of time carved out for visiting the vineyards and so here is a little bit of information on Napa.

Wine making in Napa is pretty recent with most of the wineries starting in the eighties and nineties. Since then pretty much every square inch of the land has been converted in vineyards and the rest is dedicated to roads that lead to vineyards. We got out to probably the most famous vineyard, Opus One which was founded by Baron Philippe Rothschild and Robert Mondavi in 1980 (see how new it is!). Opus One is unusual in that they only make one type of wine - a Cabernet Sauvignon blend at $195/bottle. Here are some pictures from the winery, which was pretty impressive.


Here's a lot of expensive wine
We also went to Silver Oak winery



Where they have a very nice restaurant just overlooking the fermentation tanks
[warning - boring techy interlude]
On the coach on the way back from Napa I had a bit of a glimpse of the connected world that our kids are going to take for granted in terms of always being able to access the internet. A couple of the guys had wi-fi hotspots and everyone on the coach was using them to catch up on emails, surf the web etc on their laptops. On Friday Sprint are bringing out a phone which allows you to connect up to 8 devices to its hotspot. It was pretty interesting at a time when the iPad and other devices are coming with a 3G option - I can't help but think that putting 3G/4G capability into any connected device other than a phone is a waste of time and in 12-24 months everyone will have realized it. A colleague was saying to me that in the future we'll just need our phones and our car keys, personally I think the car keys are also going to be redundant.

Read a couple of thoght provoking books recently, I'm just finishing one called 'The Shock Doctrine' by Naomi Klein - very good and talks about how governments have got very good at using crisis situations to pass very aggressive free market laws which benefit the few at the expense of the many. Just before that I read 'The Next 100 years' by George Friedman which really makes a good case for the fact that from about 2020 onwards the populations of most developed countries will start to shrink and the need will be to attract immigrants not to dissuade them from entering countries. Anyway, both of these are well worth a read, the Klein book is much longer and the first 100 pages seem to be stretching the point a bit but it makes for an enlightening if not very cheerful read. The Friedman book is a much lighter read but has some very interesting viewpoints which he summarizes on the link.